Featured

On Gaslighting 

The term “gaslighting” is one of those words that comes out of nowhere and now seems to pop-up regularly.  It was Merriam Webster’s “word of the year” in 2022. In its pop-psychology usage, gaslighting refers to “Confident, high-achieving women” who are “caught in demoralizing, destructive, and bewildering relationships” that caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.”

The Fight Over Schedule F

Before former President Trump left office, he issued an executive order to reclassify nearly 70% of federal civil service bureaucrats into a new job category dubbed “Schedule F.” Schedule F employees would lose many of the civil service protections. President Biden rescinded the executive order, but a major promise of the former President’s campaign is that he would reclassify and fire large numbers of the civil service and replace them with loyalists.

The Supreme Court in a Divided Nation

Jill Lepore writes about how Chief Justice William Howard Taft presided over a divided Court at a time of great ideological ferment. Taft brought a pragmatic and political sensibility to the Court. He both made the Court more efficient and expanded its power and authority. And as a conservative amidst the Progressive Era, Taft set the Court on his path of obstructing progressive legislation. 

On Zion, Zionism, and Zionists: A Biblical History

Jim Sleeper begins his long essay on the many forgotten historical and religious foundations of the shallow modern understanding of claims like “zionism,” “settler colonialism,” and “antisemitism” by quoting T.S. Eliot who writes, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We can’t understand the eruptions in the Middle East and in the United States without facing the ancient religious passions that drive American and Jewish history.

Tekhines

Sarah Chandler is discovering the ancient Jewish art of measuring graves, or tekhines, and she writes about her visit to Hannah Arendt’s grave at Bard College. "I’ve invited my friends to accompany me to the cemetery that sits in the center of the campus of Bard College, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. It is just over 100 miles north of my Brooklyn apartment, but I suspect it will take us at least three hours to get there on a Monday afternoon."

"Mafioso Politics"

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt insists that we look reality in the face and seek to understand even what is most strange, difficult, and horrific. In a new essay, Timothy Snyder analyzes the context of how Trump is seeking to normalize criminality and violence. Snyder’s essay reminds us of Arendt’s worry in her final essay, that “Public opinion is dangerously inclined to condone not crime in the streets but all political transgressions short of murder.”

Chilling Pro-Palestinian Speech

Eyal Press, has written about my Bard College colleague and collaborator, Ken Stern, who has become a critic of the chilling effect of using the the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.) definition of antisemitism to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses. Stern was one of the original creators of the definition, which was intended to help quantify incidences of antisemitism. But he has always opposed the use of the definition to shut down or regulate speech.

The End of The Golden Age

Franklin Foer has an essay arguing that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” What Foer calls the Golden Age was not only good for Jews; the emergence of Jewish-Americans helped define a new American liberalism, one the shed the assimilationist metaphor of the melting pot for the hyphenated-identity of the mosaic. But that Golden Age is ending. Antisemitism, once relegated to the fringes of American society, is back with a vengeance.

The Supreme Court Between Power and Authority

Last week, the Court agreed without dissent to decide whether a former president of the United States is immune from criminal prosecution. But even amidst a unanimous judgment, the justices couldn't present themselves as a body above politics. For Hannah Arendt, the authority of the American Supreme Court was an essential aspect of the country’s foundation of freedom. Without it, all laws appear simply as means of power and politics.